Ecuador, ALBA and the FARC

Ecuador, ALBA and the FARC

Recent remarks by
Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez on the civil war in
Colombia and Ecuador's decision not to join the Alternativa
Bolivariana de las Americas (ALBA) solidarity based
cooperation initiative (1) shows progressive leaders are
taking stock on Latin American integration. President Rafael
Correa suggests his government's decision is linked to
efforts to revive the Andean Community of Nations (CAN)
group which Venezuela abandoned when the Peruvian and
Colombian government's insisted on negotiating bilateral
"free trade" agreements with the United States.

Aporrea.org reports Correa as admitting that he told
Chavez in 2007, "you return to the CAN and Ecuador will
immediately join ALBA". Venezuela's government may well be
quietly relieved, since Ecuador's decision is very
ambivalent, keeping its options open and continuing to
develop close bilateral trade links with Venezuela. It may
well suit the ALBA countries - Bolivia, Cuba, Dominica,
Nicaragua and Venezuela - to consolidate gains so far and to
develop ALBA's closely linked PETROCARIBE preferential
energy and trade programme covering most of the Caribbean
and much of Central America.

Ecuador's announcement comes
shortly after the recent European Union-Latin American
summit in Peru's capital Lima and follows typically bullying
remarks by European Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson, Tony
Blair's legacy-man in Brussels.(2) Mandelson is alleged to
have threatened, in a private meeting, to exclude from EU
trade negotiations with the CAN group, any country insisting
on alternatives to a free trade agreement. This comes at the
same time as the US government has announced the
reactivation of the US navy's fourth fleet - a massive
escalation of the military threat against the ALBA countries
in general and Venezuela in particular.

So Western Bloc
countries are exerting pressure on all fronts against
regional efforts to build autonomous alternatives to
corporate globalization. In Nicaragua this week, the interim
Nicaraguan Foreign Minister Manuel Coronel Katz felt it
necessary to urge foreign diplomats in the country not to
intervene in the country's internal affairs.(3) To which the
Italian ambassador is reported to have responded, "Nicaragua
needs the help of donor countries", as much as to say,
"we'll make them an offer they cannot refuse" - no change to
Western Bloc soup du jour gangsterism there.

To that
background, one has to add Colombian narco-terror President
Alvaro Uribe's fierce efforts to internationalize his
country's civil war. Uribe's government followed up their
March 1st attack in Ecuadoran territory, which killed FARC
peace negotiator Raul Reyes and others, with concerted
efforts to implicate Ecuador and Venezuela as supposed FARC
accomplices. Such accusations have been dismissed even by
corporate globalization fellow travellers like José Miguel
Insulza Secretary General of the Organization of American
States.

But those accusations are readily echoed in
Western Bloc corporate media and avidly exploited by the US
government as part of its regional destabilization strategy.
The latest episode involved a clumsily staged operation to
frame an alleged Venezuelan national guard member on the
Colombian border in an attempt to "prove" the Venezuelan
authorities supply the FARC. Such efforts would be farcical
if their consequences were not to provide copy to corporate
media propaganda sheets like the New York Times, whose
columnist Simon "Judith Miller" Romero, has been acutely
criticised by Stephen Lendman.(4)

One should also take
into account the recession affecting the United States and
Europe which is likely to worsen sharply later this year and
well into 2009. As the drive towards corporate globalization
stalls, the Western Bloc governments that hoped it would
sustain their global economic dominance will be less
reluctant to use military force - hence the menaces and
military intimidation towards Iran and Venezuela. That is
the broad context in which President Chavez recently
declared, more forcefully than ever before, that it was time
for the FARC to release all prisoners unconditionally and
that their guerrilla campaign was no longer a valid
strategy.(5)

It may be worth noting that President Chavez
did not withdraw his earlier calls for the FARC to be
recognized internationally as a belligerent force in
Colombia's civil war, now over 40 years old. The FARC's
response to the Venezuelan President's appeal (6) repeated
the offer they have made for years of a prisoner exchange,
although the statement did not rule out the unilateral
release of Ingrid Betancourt and other civilians held by the
FARC. Among the prisoners they hope will be part of any such
exchange are Ricardo Palmera ("Simón Trinidad") and Anayibe
Rojas ("Sonia").

Both Ricardo Palmera and Anayibe Rojas
were extradited from Colombia to the US on what observers
like the lawyer Paul Wolf (7) regard as trumped up charges
of narcotics dealing. Rojas was convicted on the evidence of
Colombian government officials, paid informers and alleged
FARC deserters. The case against Palmera had to be dropped.

Little has been written about the collapse of the case
against Ricardo Palmera, presumably because it is extremely
inconvenient for all those people who parrot the accusation
that the FARC finance their guerrilla campaign by narcotics
dealing. Here was an important FARC leader extradited on
narcotics charges and the case against him on those charges
had to be withdrawn. One might have thought that was worth
looking at.

When one does try and find evidence that the
FARC finance their guerrilla campaign with profits from the
drugs trade one finds that Anayibe Rojas seems to be the
only FARC member ever convicted of narcotics offences in the
US. Her conviction - for conspiracy not for any actual
transaction - was based on the evidence of the FARC's
political and military enemies. When Rojas was pressed by US
officials in Colombia to accuse her FARC comrades of
narcotics dealing she refused to do so. So in over 40 years,
only one FARC member has ever been convicted - and then only
on a charge of conspiracy to import 5kg or more of cocaine -
in a narcotics case in the US.

What, then, is the origin
of the routine assertions that the FARC finance their
guerrilla campaign with narcotics dealing? The main sources
of the accusations seem to be the US military's Southern
Command, the Drugs Enforcement Agency and the Presidential
Office for the National Control of Drug Policy - zero out of
ten for political independence. If one tries to find the
origins of that accusation it gets harder and harder not to
conclude that it is yet another convenient US government
promoted distortion of the reality of narcotics dealing from
Colombia to the US.

That reality became very clear on May
14th this year when the Colombian government agreed to
extradite 14 leading right wing paramilitary commanders to
the US on narcotics charges.(8) One of them, Salvatore
Mancuso, had been wanted by the US authorities for nearly
ten years on charges of importing 17 tons of cocaine into
the US. The obvious reason for their sudden extradition is
that they were key witnesses involved in trials in Colombia
linking Alvaro Uribe and almost 60 indicted politicians,
mostly Uribe supporters, many of them in prison, to mass
murder and narcotics dealing. Their removal to the US was
mighty convenient for the Uribe regime.

That fact tends
not to figure readily in the blithering propaganda fog
justifying the US "war on drugs" industry and the multitude
of organizations and individuals that thrive on its funding.
Propaganda outlets like the New York Times or the UK
Guardian are hardly going to report persistently or in any
depth that their governments support, arm and train at a
cost of billions of dollars each year a government up to its
eyes in drugs and mass murder. The New York Times acted
fiercely to discredit Gary Webb's "Dark Alliance"
revelations of US official complicity in the drugs business.
So it should come as no surprise when accusations against
the FARC of sustaining their guerrilla campaign by exporting
cocaine to the US fail to hold up against the
facts.:

Item: One solitary convicted FARC member fitted up
by paid informers for conspiracy.

Despite over US$5bn in US military aid in the
last six years , the FARC continue to defy Colombia's armed
forces totalling over 400,000 soldiers and armed police. By
not winning, in effect President Uribe has lost the war
against the FARC. So it suits him and his European and
United States backers to use his rotten paramilitary and
narcotics based regime - completely isolated within the
region - to internationalize his failed internal war and
attack regional integration processes that threaten to
hinder or even stop corporate globalization in Latin
America.

Underpinning all the Western Bloc propaganda
justifying their governments unjustifiable support for the
Uribe regime in Colombia is the determination to continue
the war. The FARC have repeatedly offered to negotiate both
the immediate issue of the prisoner exchange and the wider
issue of the civil war itself. Even when the two prisoner
exchanges took place earlier this year, Uribe's forces
continued bombing areas where they knew the released
hostages were en route to freedom. The murder by bombing of
Raul Reyes in Ecuador killed the FARC's leading negotiator
for the prisoner exchange.

Neither the Uribe regime nor
the Bush regime want peace in Colombia. Just as in
Palestine, on Colombia too the US and its allies use
double-speak. That is why, whether in Afghanistan,
Palestine, Iraq, Somalia or Colombia all the freedom and
democracy rhetoric ends in murder and oppression. This
procedure is global Western Bloc government policy. It
consistently accompanies their programme of corporate
globalization. Any resistance to this hypocrisy and its
sadistic practice is branded as terrorism.

Andy
Worthington points out (9) "In a further attempt to stifle
dissent, the Military Commissions Act defined an “enemy
combatant” as someone who has either engaged in or
supported hostilities against the US..." That twisted logic,
defying well-established international law, was rejected and
challenged by the FSLN government in Nicaragua when it
granted political asylum to three survivors of the murderous
Colombian incursion into Ecuador on March 1st. The Mexican
Lucía Morett, and the Colombians, Doris Torres Bohórquez
and Martha Pérez Gutiérrez, currently remain under the
protection of the Nicaraguan authorities. (10)

The FSLN
government's support for the survivors of Colombia's illegal
attack in Ecuador is just one more example of why it is a
target, along with the governments of Evo Morales and Hugo
Chavez and to a lesser degree perhaps that of Rafael Correa
of the Western Bloc military, economic and diplomatic
offensive. Currently, the right wing and centre right
parties are cranking up accusations that the FSLN government
is moving towards dictatorship. It is the same script used
in Haiti, Bolivia and Venezuela. Managua's Radio Ya station
reports (11) shock groups have been trained in the US and
are now at work preparing destabilization activities around
the country.

Western Bloc countries are deploying their
military, diplomatic and economic power to undermine the
solidarity based ALBA integration initiative and to target
directly member countries like Bolivia, Nicaragua and
Venezuela. The recent fabricated hysteria over vague
messages in mysterious laptops allegedly captured during
Colombia's criminal foray into Ecuador was part of that. The
collapse of the trial against Ricardo Palmera set back
attempts to morph Venezuela's mediation role in the prisoner
negotiations with the FARC into Venezuelan complicity in
cocaine imports to the US.

No wonder, in such a context,
that Rafael Correa and his government colleagues have
decided to hedge their bets. At the same time as trying to
coax Venezuela back into the Community of Andean Nations
they are negotiating bilateral deals with the government of
President Chavez. Nor is it much of a surprise that
President Chavez himself, as James Petras has noted, has
decided to echo the Cuban official line on the FARC.

The
FARC too have survived worse difficulties than they face
currently. In terms of regional diplomacy, progressive
governments like Ecuador and Venezuela and its ALBA allies
seem to be hunkering down. They are preparing for whatever
economic or military intimidation the crisis-ridden Western
Bloc imperialist countries may have in store before the
plutocrats change guard in Washington.

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